Christin's Words from Sunshine Hill

Monday, July 21, 2014

This is the
land which yeShall
divide by lot. And neither division nor unityMatters.
This is the land. We have our inheritance.

-T.S.
Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”

The land thirsts.

The earth cracks open like old
skin

Like hands of the farmer, bleeding

As he digs through stones that
surface

From the hardened clay.

The sky has turned to flame.

Lungs ache breathing the triple
digit air.

Attempts to bring water up from
deep aquifers

Deplete the natural wells.

Star thistle, goat’s weed, and
poison oak

Flourish in aridity;

The wilderness will not become a
garden this year.

Green is a luxury earth cannot
afford.

Here in the dark container of night
I sit in artificial light, working out a plan for sprinkling systems although
at this point in the devastation what power or intelligence do I have? Nature
will not submit to being fixed. Earth will not be moved. The man-made pipes
crack and break in the farmer’s bleeding hands. He sits in the rocks and hits
at the stony ground. I watch him, a man from the caves wielding the tool of
inadequacy. Neither he nor the world can weep.

Here among these rocks in the
darkness of my soul I sit remembering. Others have visited this place where
gardens become desert and life’s bones lie scattered. They have heard the locusts’
song.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

You haven't seen me here in quite a while. It isn't that I haven't written anything. I have. But journals tend to be private documents, and dreams are keys to the soul for those who have a knack for interpretation. Since I last wrote here my dreams have taken up all my writing time. When the flood of dreams began it lifted me on a surge of images right out of my bed to my computer where I wrote for hours. Do you dream like that? Passionate dreaming. Integral dreaming. Dreams that intuition declares must mean something, must be doing something to you, changing you somehow that you don't yet comprehend.

Sri Aurbindo--a King's College (Cambridge) educated Indian man born in Calcutta who became an activist, a philosopher, a Yogi, and a saint (1872-1950)--placed dreams within a universal context of being. "In sleep we leave the physical body, only a subconscient residue remaining, and enter all planes and all sorts of worlds. In each we see scenes, meet beings, share in happenings, come across formations, influences, suggestions which belong to these planes...Planes of supraphysical existence, worlds of larger life, mind or psyche which are there behind and whose influences come to us without our knowledge. Occasionally we get a dream from these planes, something more than a dream, -- a dream experience which is a record direct or symbolic of what happens to us or around us here." [from Integral Yoga].

Meanwhile Carl Gustav Jung, exploring his own psychological experiences, was reaching a similar awareness. His dreams tapped into something so vast and beyond his individual consciousness that he found himself in a timeless experience of the blood bath in Europe that hadn't yet happened, but that he would recognize later as the First World War.

Neither of these giants of the human soul were the first to engage in this exploration. It's been going on since what we call the Dream Times in most ancient and not so ancient cultures. It's just that they both spent their lives studying consciousness, and they wrote about their findings in a language that strikes us as more scientific than the language of the mystic. This is not to say they didn't also use poetic and mythic language. They did. Read Aurobindo's Savitri. Read Jung's Red Book.

Many writers begin with dream. A poet, a novelist, a writer of memoir, the musical theorist, the philosopher of art. Those are obvious. But who is not telling us where they begin? The cosmologist? The theoretical physicist? The historian? Go deep enough into reality and eventually one passes through the realm of dreams. Its language is one everyone would do well to learn.

If I learn this language will it change my life? Even this old life? Dreams may be constellations in the sky of the soul. If I travel through the dark, should I not pay attention to their light and the map it provides?

The Root of Beauty

THE EDGE OF TENDERNESS

THE BLUE SHAWL

The FarNear Journals

GYPSY BONES

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About Me

I'm a writer and observer of beauty in nature and people, a singer of praise and a dreamer who stares into both light and darkness hoping to see someday the Face of God.
My journey has led from the northern lakes, to a convent on the prairie, to lifelong education including a doctorate in ministry, to a vocation of midwifery of souls, to this place, Casa Chiara, where the light shines and John Sack and I join our lives, care for nature, pray and contemplate, study and write.
Published Works:
THE ROOT OF BEAUTY: A SPIRITUAL MEMOIR, THE EDGE OF TENDERNESS: A MEMOIR, THE BLUE SHAWL,THE FARNEAR JOURNALS, GYPSY BONES,
ALTAR MUSIC,
CIRCLE OF MYSTERIES,
WOMANCHRIST,
BLESSINGS,
FINDING STONE,
CARING COMMUNITY,
A CRY IN THE DESERT.
Los Angeles Times Best Novel of 2000 for ALTAR MUSIC.
Recipient of four prizes/commendations for CIRCLE OF MYSTERIES.